request: target official package generation tools

[mcandre]

fpm's ambituous goal of generating packages from scratch, unfortunately has the consequence of inviting bitrot.

Even if fpm fully implements every possible metadata option for a package type, perfectly, then the package system eventually ends up breaking compatibility later. At that point, we require laborious development effort to revive our low level implementation. Often multiple times, with each upstream breaking change.

I think this is the same approach by nfpm, goreverser, etc.

As a developer, I too, make this mistake. I don't like to depend on shelling out, or additional dependencies, whenever possible. But there is a cost to trying to reimplement these low level details. Perfect Ruby, Go, and Rust API's do not exist, for every package management system.

That's why I recently pivoted to raising the abstraction level from API's, for rockhopper.

https://github.com/mcandre/rockhopper

The first few versions of rockhopper raise the abstraction layer up to containers, where it's trivial to provision and use per-distro package generation tools. Breakages will still occur, but most of them are automatically resolved by the distro's own build tools. So we mitigate let's say 90% of breaking changes.

Planning to provide an option for host shell package build commands, as a way to fold macOS into the mix.

[jordansissel]

There’s a lot of trade-offs!

Some package tools cannot work easily outside of their ecosystem - it’s a challenge building an rpm from a simple directory of files that have already had a build process applied. Rpm wants to be the build process. Same for many other tools, and using them in weird unsupported ways may lead to the same bitrot you describe.

Part of my reason for avoiding tooling is to make it easier(?) to build packages for systems that are not the current host. Like, osxpkg depends on tooling basically only available on a Mac, and that’s boring and tedious.

It’s a trade off to the future where new format changes and features need to be chased. But using upstream tooling has the reverse. I don’t know what the right answer is sometimes ;)